Author: William Olson

The phone was fine two years ago. Now Maps takes eleven seconds to open and the keyboard trails your thumbs. Nothing broke. Four things happened, roughly in order. Storage filled up and started fighting back Photo by Julia M Cameron on Pexels Flash storage writes fastest into empty blocks. When the disk fills, the controller…

Every household has the drawer. Three or four phones, one with a cracked corner, one that’s a backup to a backup. They lose something like 15 to 20 percent of their resale value per year just sitting there. The decision is sell, donate, or keep, and the honest version of that decision takes ten minutes…

Something went sideways. The phone boots to a logo and stops, or it boots to recovery and gives you a wall of red text, or it does nothing at all. First move: put it down for sixty seconds. Adrenaline makes people reflash random zip files, and random zip files turn fixable problems into weekend problems.…

The bootloader is the first code that runs when you press the power button. It checks the signature on the boot image, decides the software is legitimate, and hands off to Android. Unlocking it means telling that check to relax. You gain the ability to flash unsigned images. You lose your data. Both things happen…

The drawer has a phone in it. A Pixel 3a, a Galaxy S9, maybe a OnePlus 6. The screen is fine, the battery holds most of a day, and the phone stopped receiving security patches two years ago. That last one is the actual problem. A ROM fixes it. Photo by John (Giannis) Tekeridis on…

Flashing is mostly waiting around. The ten minutes that actually brick phones are the first ten, when you’re excited and skipping steps. Run this list before you type a single fastboot command. Photo by Sleepi Alleyne on Pexels Back up what the cloud doesn’t keep Photos are usually fine if Google Photos was on. What…